Part II. HUMAN NATURAL HISTORY Chapter 3. Hunting and ...

Part II. HUMAN NATURAL HISTORY Chapter 3. Hunting and Gathering Societies Chapter 4. Horticultural Societies Chapter 5. Pastoral Societies Chapter 6. Agrarian Societies Chapter 7. Commercial/Industrial Societies

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Chapter 3. HUNTING AND GATHERING SOCIETIES

Life before civilization was "nasty, brutish, and short!"

Thomas Hobbes 1650

Hunters and gatherers are the "original affluent society!"

Marshall Sahlins 1969

Introduction to Part II

A. Plan for next five chapters: The chapters in Part II will follow closely the traditional division of societies into

technological types. We will emphasize the effects of environmental variation on the adaptations of human cultures, following Steward. For present purposes, we will take the basic types of societies as historical givens. The last series of chapters in the course will return to the problems of the evolutionary transformation of one kind of society into another after we have considered evolutionary mechanisms and the nature of systemic interactions with environments in more detail.

The discussion will focus on five basic types of societies, defined initially in terms of their basic subsistence technology (mode of production):

(a) Hunting and Gathering Societies. Those peoples whose technology is designed to use primarily wild game and plant resources. (b) Horticultural Societies. Societies that depend primarily on cultivated plants for subsistence, but that lack the use of draft animals and the plow. (c) Pastoral Societies. People who emphasize the raising of livestock. (d) Agrarian Societies. Societies that depend mainly on plant cultivation, and that use draft animals and plows. (e) Commercial/Industrial Societies. Societies with a majority of the population engaged in trade and manufacturing. There are several more specialized types; e.g., Lenski and Lenski (1987) also list fishing, and maritime societies. These are of minor importance generally, although maritime societies such as the Greek city-states of ancient times and Venice at the beginning of the modern period do play an important role in theoretical discussions because they precociously resemble modern societies. Figure 3-1 reproduces a diagram from Lenski and Lenski's (1987:82) that summarizes the most common, but not the only, evolutionary pathways

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among these types:

Figure 3-1. Lenski and Lenski's (1987:82) ecological-evolutionary taxonomy of societies.

Industrial Societies

Level of Technology

Agrarian Societies

Maritime Societies

Herding Societies

Horticultural Societies Hunting and Gathering Societies

(?) Fishing Societies

Semiarid, arid, and desert environments

Cultivable Land:

Unsuited to

Suited to plow

plow cultivation cultivation

Marine environments

Type of Environment

Common patterns of societal expansion Common patterns of societal evolution

The Big Question is: does human ecology provide a useful taxonomy? To the extent that Steward's concept of the culture core is useful, we expect to find a complex of associated traits that surround the technology and vary as technology and environment vary. In essence, we are testing the utility of the ecological/evolutionary approach to human behavior by organizing the grand sweep of the data on human diversity into a few categories using the culture core concept. If this exercise results in a compact, informative taxonomy, there must be something to the idea.

With regard to cultural traits, aside from the toolkit itself, that are candidates for in-

clusion in the cultural core, we will focus on the following:

(a) Demographic variables, including average human density, settlement size, and degree of mobility. (b) Social and political organization, including patterns of relations between individuals, degree of stratification, degree of occupational specialization, patterns of leadership, institutions of social control and collective decision-mak-

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ing, etc. (c) Symbolic culture, natural and supernatural belief systems, political ideology, art, public ritual, and the like.

Taxonomy is always a difficult business, and ecological (functional rather than lineage-based) taxonomies are always very messy in detail. Let us agree to take our classification system a bit lightly. There is no nice neat branching pattern such as is furnished by organic evolution as it makes species. Humans are all the same species; races and cultures fairly freely exchange ideas and genes. Mixed types, borderline cases, and the like are bound to be common. The analogy between the historical and contemporary variants is especially likely to be rather imperfect. Ancient Rome and modern India are not exactly comparable, even if they are agrarian societies in our scheme. We will often have trouble finding the best criterion to classify given examples at any level of a functional classification scheme. To take a concrete example, how do we classify the African forest Pygmies? They gain about half their subsistence hunting and gathering in the forest and about half from horticultural crops obtained by working for Bantu horticulturalists. We can avoid endless terminological hassles here only by agreeing to use the classification as a means to an end, not as an end in itself.

Does a culture core exist that varies as a function of environment, given technology? If the Stewardian hypothesis is correct, and especially if the enlarged culture core of modern ecological anthropologists is correct, we expect to find strong statistical associations with these variables and technology especially when the environmental variation within basic technical categories is taken into account. We also expect to be able to interpret much of the variation in the culture core in adaptive terms. In the last lecture we did see that the associations in Western North America were fairly strong.

At a given level of technology, culture core variables should be a strong function of environment; environmental determinism should work well enough within sets of societies deploying a similar technology. To test the Stewardian hypothesis, we will look for situations where there is a strong environmental gradient being exploited by people using the same basic technology. If the people are neighbors, technology can be borrowed back and forth, so that we can largely control for the effects of historical differences in technological level. If Steward was right, we should see the effects of environmental variation quite clearly on such gradients.

Demography is a key variable relating environment to many culture core features.Technology and environment determine how much food can be produced by a soci-

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ety. Food production per unit land determines overall population size and density. Food production per human producer (labor efficiency) determines how many people can be released from food production for specialized occupations, like potters, priests, and policemen. Transport technology determines how easily food can be moved from the countryside to support city folk, hence population concentration.

I. Hunting and Gathering: Background

A. History This form of technology is the oldest and most widely distributed in time and space.

The ancient hominids were probably hunters and gatherers in some sense from about 2.5 million years ago, when stone tools first appear in the archaeological record. Thus, humans were hunters and gatherers for by far the largest fraction of human evolutionary history. However, the development of the technology was relatively slow until about an acceleration in evolutionary developments began about 100,000 years ago. During the early Pleistocene (ca. 2 million to 1 million years ago) hominids were restricted to Africa. After about 1 million years ago Homo erectus type hominids with a kit of stone tools called the Achuelean industry, spread to most of warm and temperate Eurasia. About 100,000 years ago more sophisticated industries appeared, along with Neanderthal hominids and their relatives. These people penetrated into quite cold environments. Although ancient hominids hunted or scavenged animals and gathered plant resources, we do not know very precisely what their lifeways were like. Neanderthals, and other relatively recent but archaic hominids, had brains as big as ours but very robust skeletons and a considerably different stone tool technology than later anatomically modern humans. Neanderthals had many healed injuries to their skeletons resembling those seen in rodeo cowboys, suggesting some very rough activities, perhaps killing large animals with hand-held weapons instead of projectiles like hurled spears or arrows. Fully modern humans evolved between about 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, but the toolkit of Late Pleistocene peoples suggests a somewhat different style of life than among contemporary hunters and gatherers. Late Pleistocene peoples (50,000-10,000 BP-Before Present) had a relatively greater emphasis on big game relative to fish, shellfish and plants (especially plants that require heavy investment in grinding, leaching and other processing) than is common in the Holocene (the last 10,000 years) among the hunters and gatherers we know from the present and recent past.

Anatomically modern humans spread to Australia and America, the last major habitable land areas of the Earth. The world was full of people, if rather thinly populated, by the eve of the evolution of horticulture 10,000 years ago. The relatively recent shift from

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